Hamish X Goes to Providence Rhode Island (29 page)

Mr. Kipling lay back and closed his eyes. “Yes, sadly, that is true.” He opened his blue eyes and looked up at Mimi. “Good luck, Mimi Catastrophe Jones. From the moment I met you on Snow Monkey Island, I knew you were a special girl.”

Mimi's face reddened. “No need to go all mushy.” She scowled, but her eyes stung. Fortunately, Mrs. Francis gathered her in a soft, strong embrace.

“I have to stay with him and the others who are hurt,” she fretted. “Please be careful, my darling Mimi. Find Parveen and hurry back.”

“Aw, Mrs. Francis, let go, will ya?” Mimi extricated herself from the housekeeper's grasp and rubbed away the tears from her eyes before they could spill down her cheeks. “I ain't dead yet, and with luck I ain't gonna be soon.”

“Mimi! Let's go!” Cara called from the window.

“Comin',” Mimi replied. She turned and looked at the two dearest adults she had ever known. Mr. Kipling had taught her everything about being honourable, and Mrs. Francis had just been … wonderful. She hated to leave them behind. “I'll be back. Don't worry.” She turned to go, but stopped and turned back, holding the sabre up in front of her. “I'll use this fer both of us.” Then she ran across the lawn and hopped into the window.

Mr. Kipling watched her go. “I do love that girl.”

“So do I.” Mrs. Francis kissed his forehead, fighting tears. “So do I.”

Inside the wrecked parlour, several Guards were lying on the floor. Xnasha and Cara had tried to make them comfortable. They were too sorely wounded to go any farther. Mimi did a quick headcount and found that ten were left in action, including Cara, Xnasha, and her.

“Good work, everybody,” Mimi said. “You can rest now. Mrs. Francis'll be in to take care o' y'all soon. The rest of ya, make sure y'all got sticks and take all the extra batteries for the stun rifles from the ones stayin' here.” The Guards moved to obey.

Xnasha beckoned from the kitchen doorway. Mimi, Cara, and the others followed her.

Inside, they found a perfect little kitchen complete with black-and-white tiled floor, Formica table and chairs, a shiny chrome radio, and a toaster gleaming under the overhead light.

“Well, ain't this quaint.”

Cara sniffed. “This is the Headquarters of the deadly ODA?”

Xnasha shook her head. She went to a tall cupboard with twin doors. She pulled the doors open to reveal the shiny sliding doors of an elevator car. The doors opened. The car was empty.

“Well, ain't
that
quaint! Everybody in.”

“Are you sure it's safe?” Cara asked.

“Heck, nothin' around here is safe. I just got my butt kicked by an old lady!”

“Good point,” Cara conceded.

They all trooped into the car. The doors whisked shut behind them.

Mr. Crisp

Mr. Sweet's voice sounded in Mr. Crisp's skull. It was as if his superior were standing beside him instead of descending from orbit, kilometres above the Earth. “Have you secured the intruder, Mr. Crisp?”

“Not yet, but we are closing in on him. The swarm is on his heels.”

“Excellent. We have retrieved the asset. We will be on the ground and in Headquarters within a quarter of an hour.”

“Yes, Mr. Sweet,” Mr. Crisp acknowledged. “Understood.”

The voice was gone. Mr. Crisp spoke out loud. “Mother? Status of the swarm?”

“The swarm is in pursuit of the intruder … One moment, please. Sensors have been tripped. The outer security checkpoint has been breached. Mrs. Guardian has been neutralized. Intruders have entered the main elevator.”

Mr. Crisp couldn't believe what he was hearing. “Are you certain, Mother?”

“Verified contact with second group of intruders. They are approaching the main level. Shall I stop the elevator?”

Mr. Crisp thought for a moment. “No, bring them to this level. Redirect the swarm to meet them when they get off the elevator. I will assemble more agents.”

“Redirecting the swarm.”

Mr. Crisp sent out a call for more agents. There were few available. Almost everyone was involved in the preparations for the opening of the gate. Only one hundred agents out of thousands answered the summons. Mr. Crisp was confident that they would be enough.

Chapter 29

PARVEEN

Parveen toiled furiously, trying to get the work he needed to do done in the respite he had been given. He sat with his back to the huge fan in the junction of two shafts that he had come to think of as his personal quarters. In his lap, one of the broken bugs lay on its back. Parveen's electronic tool set was open beside him. He had hastily scavenged spare parts from the three broken bugs. Standing in front of him, its access panel open, stood the maintenance robot he had waylaid. Working quickly, he fashioned a detonator from the mishmash of parts and attached it to the block of plastic explosive he had stolen from the armoury. Satisfied, he stuffed the makeshift bomb into the open panel.

Next, he took off his watch. The watch was another of his designs. The watch told the time and the date, which wasn't unusual. It also was an altimeter and a Global Positioning System. While scouting the Headquarters over the past days, Parveen had taken the time to note the exact locations of strategic installations in the ODA facilities. One of those was the gate. He had not been daring enough to approach the gate directly: there were too many Grey Agents in the vicinity of the device. Instead, he had taken sightings from several points on the perimeter of the main chamber, then using simple trigonometry he had figured out the coordinates of the gate.

Now he wired his watch to the robot, inputting the gate's coordinates, and set the detonator. That done, he reconnected the robot's power source, being careful to make sure the robot's processor, its mechanical brain, was disconnected from the central computer. Parveen hoped Mother would be too preoccupied to detect one robot servitor dropping off the grid. Once his alterations were complete, he snapped the access panel closed. The robot immediately began toddling off along the ventilation shaft. Parveen watched it go, hoping his hasty handiwork would hold. The thing was now programmed to explode when it reached the gate's location. The maintenance robot was the perfect delivery system for a bomb. No one would question its presence anywhere in the facility. Parveen wasn't sure when it would arrive at the gate or what route it might take, but he could only hope the explosion would cripple the ODA's horrible apparatus.

Parveen couldn't just sit there, though. The bugs would be back. He had to wonder why the chase was called off in the first place. He took a few moments to wire together an electromagnetic pulse bomb from the remains of the metal bugs he hadn't yet used. It wouldn't be as strong as the one he'd used in Windcity that had immobilized the Firebirds and the Grey Agents in their helicopter, but it might buy him a little time. He tossed the device into his backpack and decided he needed to find out what was going on, despite the risk of a renewed attack by the metal cockroaches. He packed up his tools and set off to find a shaft cover to peer through.

He decided to go to the main chamber to see if there was any activity there. The Grey Agents had been busy building something in the shadow of the gate. Servitor robots had brought in tons of steel sheeting and scaffolding. Parveen
moved carefully down the ventilation shaft, keeping an eye out for the metal bugs, but there were none to be found. As he approached, he heard what sounded like a battle in progress.

“Y'all want some more? 'Cause I got more!” The voice rose over the din. Parveen felt his heart leap. He knew that voice.

Mimi and the others were holding their own against the onslaught of mechanical cockroaches. The glittering bugs had greeted them as they stepped out of the elevator car, swarming along the floor and threatening to engulf them. Xnasha fired bolt after bolt from her crossbow, raking the horde but to little effect.

“Sticks!” Cara cried, whipping the staff around and smashing one of the bugs as it leapt at her face. The Guards lunged forward, forming a wedge around the elevator doors with Mimi and Cara at the apex.

Mimi took stock of her surroundings while smashing the attacking bugs aside. They were at one end of a long metal walkway. To her right was a high metal wall. About a hundred metres along was a steel doorway. The door was shut. To her back was the elevator. As soon as they had stepped through its doors, they had closed behind them and refused to reopen. Mimi drove the end of her fighting stick downwards, spearing a bug. She looked to her left.

There was a vast open space. She saw the gate hanging in its wreath of cables, pulsing its sickly glow. She staggered at the sight of it. A bug took advantage of the distraction to climb her leg. It buried its steel mandibles into her thigh.

The pain was intense. Mimi cried out.

A stick smashed across the back of the bug, dislodging it from her flesh. Mimi looked up to see Cara flick another bug aside.

“Thanks,” Mimi grunted.

Cara winked and went back to defending herself. The bugs were seemingly inexhaustible. Though the Guards smashed and shattered their metal bodies, more bugs surged in to attack. Mimi glanced at the other Guards and saw they were tiring. Inch by inch, they were being pushed back. It became difficult to wield their fighting sticks without hitting one another.

Suddenly, there was a clatter behind Mimi.

“Ow,” she heard Xnasha cry.

“Cover my back!” she shouted to Cara, who sidestepped and closed the gap in the line as Mimi whirled to face the new threat.

She found no new enemy, but a vent cover lay on the steel deck. Xnasha, completely out of bolts, had been crouched at the wall, waiting to smash any bug that got through using her crossbow as a club. At the moment, she was rubbing her scalp where the vent grating had struck her as it fell from above.

“Y'all right?” Mimi asked.

“Fine. Just a bump.”

She looked up and saw a hole in the wall. She thought she saw something moving in the hole, but she couldn't seem to focus on it.

“I know yer there! Come out and I'll beat ya stupid.”

A patch of darkness detached from the mouth of the ventilation shaft and dropped to the deck. The patch of darkness shifted in colour, becoming grey as the surrounding walls. A piece of the greyness seemed to peel away to reveal the face of Parveen, blinking behind his glasses. “Please, don't beat me stupid, Mimi.”

Mimi was so surprised she nearly dropped her stick. “Parv!” she cried. She wrapped a free arm around him and
crushed the little boy to her. Xnasha stood by, her eyes wide with astonishment at the sudden appearance of this apparition out of thin air.

“Mimi, please! I have managed to stay alive this long. Refrain from strangling me now. And it's Parveen, as you well know.”

Mimi reluctantly let go of her friend and stepped back to look at him. “Sneaky suit?”

“It was very effective, I must say.”

“Parv, this is Xnasha. She's from Atlantis.”

Parveen blinked. “Of course she is.” He looked at the seething mass of bugs held at bay by the desperate line of defenders. “You seem to have an infestation on your hands.” He reached into his pack and pulled out a tangle of wires and circuit boards.

“Is that what I think it is?”

“Step aside, please.”

Mimi did as she was told, saying, “Watch this, Xnasha.”

Parveen ran forward a few steps and hurled the object out over the heads of the Guards. It went in a shallow arc and landed in the middle of the massed bugs. There was a dull thud.

The effect was instantaneous. The bugs closest to the impact immediately squealed and lay still. In an ever-widening arc, more and more bugs went dead as their circuits were fried by the pulse bomb. In a matter of seconds, the attacking swarm was turned into a glittering carpet of immobile scrap metal. The Guards leaned on their sticks, panting in relief.

“I shore am glad to see you, Parv.”

Parveen removed his glasses and polished them with the corner of a handkerchief he pulled from his pocket. “Parveen, please! The feeling is mutual. Where is Hamish X?”

“Well, that there's a long story. The short version is, he ain't with us.”

“I'm sorry to hear that,” Parveen said. “I was hoping he would find a way to utterly defeat the ODA and rescue all the children held captive here. I guess one can't have everything.”

Cara interrupted. “I'm glad you're all right, Parveen. How did you end up here in the first place?”

“I stowed away in Noor's compartment when the Grey Agents harvested the children after the fall of the Hollow Mountain. I've been hiding in the air vents. In the meantime, I have tried to learn as much about the facility as possible.”

“I have to know where my brother is,” said Cara.

“It pains me to say that I know he is here.”

“Where?”

“The good news is, he's alive … sort of.”

“Sort of?”

“And therein lies the bad news …,” Parveen began. He didn't get a chance to explain.

“Drop your weapons!”

The voice sounded so familiar, but Mimi couldn't place it. She turned to see a line of Grey Agents approaching in full battle dress. In their hands they held heavy rifles. Leading them was a smaller agent dressed in the standard grey trench coat and fedora. The agents advanced across the floor, boots crunching on the lifeless bugs. At a distance of ten metres, they stopped. The lead agent took three more steps and stopped.

“You can't possibly hope to escape,” the Grey Agent said. “Lay down your weapons and you will not be harmed.”

“Aidan?” Cara's voice was a whisper of horror. “Aidan? Is that you?”

Parveen leaned closer to Mimi. “That's the bad news. What happens to older children when the ODA takes them? They become agents, hosts to creatures from another world.”

“Oh, no,” Mimi breathed. “That's horrible.”